A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

This title has gone through a few title changes in the last five years. From A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age to Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-truth Era, before settling on A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking With Statistics and the Scientific Method. The core is similar to other books that explain in detail how statistics, charts and numbers are used to manipulate. Sometimes the manipulation is done to knowingly mislead. Many times, both the reader and writer are complicit in the poor understanding of what they are presenting. Covid-19 and politics have brought even more statistical lying out in the world.

The first part of the book focuses on how statistics and graphs can be used to mislead us. Then it goes on to cover other ways that we can be misled in a narrative fashion. Understanding bayesian probability can be extremely helpful in making sense of things. Slight differences in expressing inclusion and exclusion can trigger vastly different responses in our perception. News coverage tends to focus on the more rare, colorful events. This leads people to become more worried about the least probably things they hear more about. Science news coverage can be even worse. A new exciting research study makes the news. However, this could just as easily have been random noise. Once it is repeated multiple times and analyzed over different populations can we start to draw accurate conclusions. Alas, these meta-analysis do not get the great coverage. 

In analyzing media coverage, Bayes theorem can help us. We can use the 4-way table to analyze the difference from the current understanding. It is often more likely that extreme results are just flukes. The conventional analysis is more likely to be true. However, with more evidence, we have a greater likelihood of the "new" solution supplanting the current.

This book is loaded with examples of many ways that people "lie" (either intentional or accidentally) with the data they are presenting. There are plenty of tools to help us overcome these lies. Information is readily available today. It is now up to us to do the analysis.